Yvonne Horton

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley says he will send monitors to next week's elections in Inglewood, where some civic leaders and candidates have complained that City Clerk Yvonne Horton has a conflict of interest. Horton, who won the post in a special election Jan. 14, is vying with two others on April 1 for a four-year term. Her husband, Assemblyman Jerome Horton (D-Inglewood), has endorsed candidates in other local contests, including City Council and the school board.

Inglewood City Clerk Yvonne Horton on Friday denounced a campaign "hit" mailer that falsely used her name to castigate one of the candidates in next week's special election for the District 4 City Council seat. "This is the very thing I ran for office to prevent," Horton said in a press release. "Nothing positive can happen with this type of negative campaign literature."

In most local elections, the hottest contests are almost always the races for City Council or school board, the high-visibility, policy-setting offices that sometimes even serve as springboards into state or federal posts. But in Inglewood, where voters will choose a half-dozen office-holders on Tuesday, it is the intense battle for the important but politically unglamorous job of city clerk that is generating most of the attention.

Setting the stage for a new election to fill a City Council seat in Inglewood, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge tentatively ruled Friday that one of the two contestants in the June 3 runoff was not a legal resident of the council district. Judge Robert L. Hess said community activist Mike Stevens was not eligible to run for the District 4 seat when he narrowly edged Councilwoman Lorraine M. Johnson in the April 1 primary, denying her a slot on the runoff ballot.

Bad blood between Inglewood's mayor and its elected city clerk boiled over during the city's municipal elections Tuesday, with each accusing the other of interfering with the process. City Clerk Yvonne Horton and an election volunteer said Mayor Roosevelt F. Dorn instructed a photographer to take pictures of workers verifying absentee ballots. He also accused them of pulling a "switcheroo" with the results, they said.

Amid accusations that Inglewood Mayor Roosevelt Dorn was risking the city's image to advance his own political agenda, the City Council on Tuesday decisively rejected three Dorn proposals to oversee the city clerk's handling of upcoming municipal elections. Citing concerns from constituents and candidates in the April 1 elections that they could not get a fair shake if recently seated City Clerk Yvonne Horton remains in charge of the balloting, Dorn has proposed asking the U.S.

A day after polls closed in Inglewood's mayoral race, voters appear to have given the job to a retired police chief over the incumbent, a veteran politician. An unofficial tally released Wednesday by the Inglewood City Clerk's office awarded former Santa Monica Police Chief James T. Butts Jr. 56% of the vote compared to 44% for incumbent Mayor Daniel K. Tabor in the runoff election. Around 5,700 votes were cast Tuesday, according City Clerk Yvonne Horton, and an unspecified number of absentee provisional ballots were still to be counted Wednesday.

Two newly elected trustees for Glendale Community College said their goal was to maintain a high level of education despite state budget cuts that will severely limit the number of classes offered at the 25,000-student campus. "When you cut classes, it adversely affects the educational plans for the students and delays their life," Ara James Najarian, a Glendale attorney, said Wednesday. "They plan to go on to a UC school and they can't because they get stuck on a community campus."

Inglewood on Thursday tallied the final ballots from last week's controversial elections, but candidates in two of the three close races said they would ask for a recount and possibly go to court to overturn the results. According to the final, as yet uncertified, returns, Eloy Morales Jr., a field deputy to Assemblyman Jerome Horton (D-Inglewood), won the City Council District 3 seat over attorney and Lennox School Board President Trini Jimenez by 44 votes. Morales received 613 votes, or 51.8%.